Lack of racial diversity and women across UK media

No BAME guests were featured for a whole week on BBC Newsnight, a media analysis has found.

During a period in the middle of July this year, all 17 interviewees on the programme were white, the Women in Journalism group discovered.

In the same period, it was found that in national newspapers, a quarter of front-page newspaper stories were written by women and out of 111 people quoted on these front-pages, only one of them was a black woman.

On the other hand, TV news seemed to have a better representation of diverse voices compared to print, the survey found. Not only were there more TV news presenters who were women, but also 30% of TV news presenters came from BAME backgrounds.

Despite this supposed improvement, the report stated: "Out of all BAME expert guests' appearances on TV, more than half were in the context of coverage either directly related to race, such as for topics involving colonialism and Black Lives Matter, or during coverage of black and BAME communities."

Research into TV news shows, primetime radio programmes and all print newspapers published between the 13th and the 19th of July were used for the data, revealing a "shocking" lack of racial diversity and representation of women in journalism.

This comes as growing calls for better media representation of those from minority ethnic backgrounds, which have been further sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement and recent protests.

While excepting that more needs to be done, some media outlets criticised the report's collection of data as limited and selective, for example, only looking at print front-pages rather than online platforms.

Newsnight said that they had just been unlucky with the week that was selected for the dataset, as political stories dominated stories that week and the guests offered from these political parties to appear on that week's show were all white.

Women in Journalism pushed back these comments stating that the study was limited on its breadth of media monitoring due to a lack of funding for such studies.